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Comment by damian2000 | Hacker News Reader

damian2000·

Its great that it generates C but I'd worry that developers who are writing embedded code won't bother to try it - they often are trying to squeeze some code into a small amount of memory on a limited processor. Some of the things it provides - state machines, unit conversions and error logging are pretty simple to do within C anyway, and developers might not appreciate or want an additional level of abstraction.

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State Machines, as you noted, are easy to do with C. I think the added value in this respect is that this makes it much easier to manage the State Machines. I often hear guys at work complaining about how they'd like to switch to using an RTOS because the codebase is a tangled mess of State Machines (not that the two are mutually exclusive of course). Having said that, I seem to remember there is a tool dedicated to creating State Machines that compile down to C - the name escapes me however.

Ragel? http://www.complang.org/ragel/

QP framework. Its bloody brilliant.

That's the one.

This is clearly aimed at applications that must be very reliable, e.g. life-critical applications like cars (note BMW sponsor it).

Most embedded programming isn't that bug-sensitive, but quite a lot is and I'd wager they'd love something like this.

I know I'd use it if I were writing safety-critical code.

Code exists in context of a culture and processes. This may well facilitate those, but those kind of have to come first.

This adds an amazing amount of verification, but it doesn't mean that the resulting code is slow. Doing unit checks is awesome. The grid state machine view makes it easier to catch errors and refactor the transitions.

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